to help us to understand and deconstruct capitalism in order to create a sustainable and peaceful social system.

We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Thursday, May 5, 2016

This type of incident happens everyday in capitalist countries even though most people insist that they have a right of free speech, etc, guaranteed by their constitutions. If you examine many constitutions of various capitalist countries you will find many such freedoms listed, but these constitutions are only a part of the ideological structure which promises freedoms but deny them in practice.

This subterfuge is simply due to the fact that enormous wealth and control over jobs give capitalists overwhelming power. Thus, whenever the exercise of these "freedoms" become in conflict with the interests of powerful capitalists, the freedoms give way. Most people know this and modify their behavior to suit powerful capitalist interests, but this cartoonist thought he had a constitutional right to create this cartoon and others for a local newspaper. Thus his job, or his means of living, was taken away from him. The moral of this story is that you have lots of theoretical freedoms under capitalism, but you must be willing to starve to death to exercise them.